page_title: Tristan da Cunha
section_title: Flora and fauna
hierarchical_section_title: Tristan da Cunha / Flora and fauna
context_page_description: Tristan da Cunha, colloquially Tristan, is a remote group of volcanic islands in the south Atlantic Ocean. It is the most remote inhabited archipelago in the world, lying approximately 1,511 miles off the coast of Cape Town in South Africa, 1,343 miles from Saint Helena and 2,166 miles off the coast of the Falkland Islands.
  The territory consists of the inhabited island, Tristan da Cunha, which has a diameter of roughly 11 kilometres and an area of 98 square kilometres, and the wildlife reserves of Gough Island and Inaccessible Island and the smaller, uninhabited Nightingale Islands. As of October 2018, the main island has 250 permanent inhabitants who all carry British Overseas Territories citizenship. The other islands are uninhabited, except for the South African personnel of a weather station on Gough Island.
  Tristan da Cunha is a British Overseas Territory with its own constitution. There is no airstrip of any kind on the main island; the only way of travelling in and out of Tristan is by boat, a six-day trip from South Africa.
context_section_description: Many of the flora and fauna of the archipelago have a broad circumpolar distribution in the South Atlantic and South Pacific Oceans. For example, the plant species Nertera depressa was first collected in Tristan da Cunha, but has since been recorded as far away as New Zealand.
caption: French nobleman and eminent botanist Louis-Marie Aubert du Petit-Thouars, commemorated in the nomenclature of a variety of plants (e.g. Carex thouarsii) native to Tristan da Cunha.
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